How Tracy Got To Be Tracy

If you try to find the history of Tracy, California, before 1878, you can stop looking. You won’t find it.

Before 1878, the district located at the southern edge of San Joaquin County on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley was a collection of small towns and villages in an area known as Tulare Township. (Tulare Township should not be confused with Tulare County or the city of Tulare, which are located about 160 miles southwest of Tracy in Central California.)

The villages that sprouted up here in the 19th Century included Bantas (later known as Banta), Ellis, Midway and Lathrop, settlements that began as trading posts, stagecoach stops or, in the case of Midway and Lathrop, were created because the transcontinental railroad was built there.

In fact, looking at this map (below) from 1877, Tracy does not even appear yet. One year before it was founded, the space between the villages of Ellis and Bantas, connected by the original Western Pacific Railroad, is uninterrupted by any trace of Tracy:

Tulare Township in an 1877 map for the Westside Irrigation Company. The route of the under-construction San Pablo & Tulare Railroad, depicted by a dashed line bisecting the map, will terminate at a junction (near the “O” in “County”) between the towns of Ellis and Bantas. That junction would become Tracy.

When the first Western Pacific was built here in the 1860s — before it was renamed the Southern Pacific Railroad by its parent, the Central Pacific — the town of Ellis was developed around the railroad’s coaling station and its depots for both freight and produce. Bantas also had its own depot, while the Central Pacific’s main facility was located at Lathrop.

The Central Pacific had intended to build its main facilities at Stockton to serve the growing population of San Joaquin County’s largest city. The people of Stockton welcomed the opportunity to have a railroad depot to move their products and themselves across the United States, but they denied the Central Pacific the land needed to build large maintenance facilities for its locomotives, not wanting the smoke and soot that came with the big engines.

Undeterred, the Central Pacific’s controlling director, Leland G. Stanford, simply found a fairly unused stretch of land south of Stockton and had his surveyors lay out the maintenance facility there. He named this place Lathrop, after his wife’s maiden name. The location was perfectly situated on the line between Sacramento and the Bay Area and became the connecting point for another extension of the CPRR, down the Central Valley to Southern California.

The Central Pacific’s May 1870 timetable shows stops at Midway, Ellis and Bantas on the way east from Oakland

The Central Pacific grew rapidly and soon made plans for another extension, this one creating a shortcut to its Northern Railway subsidiary at Martinez on the edge of San Pablo Bay down to the CPRR’s existing line from the Bay Area to Lathrop. Sensing the chance to grow their town, the residents and business owners of Bantas pushed to have the extension line terminate in their town.

Instead, a decision was made to end the new line — incorporated as the San Pablo & Tulare Extension Railroad Company — at a spot about halfway between Bantas and Ellis, where it would meet up with yet another new CPRR line that would run down the verdant west side of the San Joaquin Valley to Los Banos and, from there, on to Los Angeles and New Orleans as part of what would become the railroad’s “Sunset Line.”

A description of the route from Tracy Junction via the new San Pablo & Tulare line, from ‘The Pacific Tourist’ (1878)

But now the Central Pacific had facilities at Lathrop and Ellis, plus another depot at Bantas and another in the foothills at Midway — but nothing at the junction where its rails from east and west and north and south would meet.

After careful deliberation, and with a solid viewpoint of what made the best sense from an operating perspective, the decision was made to relocate all of the railroad’s local operations to the new junction.

The Central Pacific’s roadmaster for the district was J.J. Tracey, headquartered at Lathrop and in charge of all of the railroad’s operations from Niles (Alameda County) to the west through to Brighton, just outside of Sacramento, the next main division point on the CPRR, covering nearly 150 miles of track.

As the extension from San Pablo was completed and construction on the new “West Side” line continued, Tracey oversaw the closing down of the CPRR’s operations at Ellis and the construction of engine facilities, depots and docks at the new junction.

Many residents and businesses in Ellis simply pulled up stakes — and pulled down their buildings — and also moved to the new junction, essentially abandoning the old town, which became the far western end of the railroad’s huge yard near what is now Corral Hollow Road near Schulte Road.

Under Tracey’s watch, the CPRR — which consolidated its various lines under the Southern Pacific name in 1888 — began to construct its vast, sprawling rail yards at the junction. In time, two large roundhouses were built here for repairing and servicing locomotives, along with facilities for refilling engines with fuel, water and sand, plus produce and freight docks, and a passenger station that was soon outgrown and replaced by a larger depot. (The passenger depot was located across Central Avenue from where the current Tracy Transit Center now stands.)

Denied the chance to became a major junction on the CPRR, Bantas over time lost its extraneous “s” and, in 1902, its railroad depot was razed and rebuilt in Benicia, where it remains standing to this date. Midway, up in the Altamont foothills, also lost its depot, but kept its United States Post Office open until 1918. The last Southern Pacific train rolled through Midway in the 1990s after which the SP’s rails were pulled up the rest of the way to Altamont; aside from a few scattered ranches, the area remains largely unpopulated.

The town that grew up around the junction became known as “Tracy Junction,” which was soon shortened to “Tracy,” ostensibly getting its name from a fellow named Lathrop Josiah Tracy who was — depending on the source — the Ohio-born director of the Sandusky, Mansfield and Newark Railroad in his home state and a very distant cousin of Leland Stanford’s wife and/or the “admired” former employer of one J.H. Stewart, who served as construction superintendent of the San Pablo & Tulare extension and had once worked for Mr. Tracy in Ohio. In either case, it is not commonly believed that Lathrop J. Tracy ever visited the fine city that is purported to bear his name.